FAUCI: So a person’s individual — individual — decision to not wear a mask not only impacts them because if they get infected, even though they say, “It’s my decision. If I get infected, I’ll worry about that.” But the fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person who may be vulnerable, who may get seriously ill. So in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights because you’re making them vulnerable. So you could argue that situation both ways.

BUCK: Welcome to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. This is Buck, and that was “The Fauch,” and you heard him over the weekend making this case, which has really been what their mentality is all along. This is how they think about things. Their unreasonable anxiety, the lockdowner mentality — the virtue signaling, the sanctimony that goes along with it, all of that — they’re not gonna let it go.

And you have to live by the rules dictated by that madness. So, Clay, in essence, it’s like “The Fauch” saying (impression), “My mask is your mask. Your mask is like my mask, and we’re a happy mask family — and shut up, take the shot, and double mask.” This guy has been… At least he’s been consistent in being awful.

CLAY: Well, the problem with the logic of the clip that we just laid out is, that doesn’t just apply to covid. What Dr. Fauci is effectively arguing is if you are ever sick and you ever get someone else sick for any reason, then you are in some way culpable for that, which is directly contrary to anything that we’ve ever said about viruses in the past. The flu exists every year. Colds exist every year.

To my knowledge, we never sit around and argue about, “Hey, who’s responsible for how I ended up sick?” Because the attenuated nature of viral transmission is so difficult that basically viruses spread — in general — through the course of normal human interaction. And that is a bargain that all of us have had to make throughout human history that in order to be human, there comes with it some risk, and one of those risks is virus.

And that’s why, Buck, I’ve been making this argument for years and years, and I think it’s a good one, that it’s worth circling back around to. And I’ll give credit to my old high school econ teacher who came up with it the first time I ever heard anybody say it. You can’t eliminate… We agree that life requires with it a certain level of risk, and I’ll give you an example, and this is one that I’ve been using for decades.

We could make cars that would guarantee, Buck, that no one ever died. How would we do that? We could put a governor on a speed limit, and no one would ever be able to drive more than 20 miles an hour. You would have to be a pretty big imbecile in a car to die driving 20 miles an hour. I mean, you could still drive off a cliff, I guess. There are certain ways that you could still allow yourself to die at 20 miles an hour.

But it’s almost impossible to die at 20 miles an hour. But society has decided that for the purposes of driving — 65, 75, 55, whatever mile per hour we’re willing to take — that we’re willing to have 40,000 people a year die because we value speed, and we balance that out with loss of life. How are we not doing that now?

BUCK: You should also have to mandate helmets in cars, by the way —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — ’cause head injuries in cars are much more common that lead to death than for cyclists. But that’s a whole other conversation.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: We are trying to make sense of the madness, an island of sanity in a storm of Fauci-ite crazy. We were just talking about before how he says you don’t have a right to breathe fresh air like a normal person has for all of human history, because other people have a right to not be exposed to your microscopic germs that you have no control over. So what we’re getting now into the end stages of what you could call the Fauci-ite madness.

You could call it the lockdown consensus or just the “anything to beat Donald Trump in 2020 and leverage all of the panic and fear possible to do so” strategy. But here we are now starting to deal with the new reality of people saying… Clay brought up a moment ago, two astute points, one we were making and many conservatives were making in the beginning of this whole thing, “Why not have a 15-mile-an-hour speed limit?” and people said, “Oh, you just want grandma to die” to that point, ’cause we don’t think it’s a fair trade to make everybody drive slow.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: I brought up the thing about bicycle helmets. If anyone does a quick look at the stats, far more people die from head injuries in car crashes than on bicycles. It’s not even close. So why shouldn’t everyone be driving around in their car with a serious helmet on? They do it for NASCAR drivers. Why not have everybody do it? We all understand at some point it’s crazy. And, Clay, here is Dr. Megan Ranney on CNN kind of saying the quiet part out loud.

RANNEY: We are never going back to a pre-pandemic reality, and I do agree that we do have to become comfortable with the fact that this virus is going to be sticking around. Our goal is to decrease severe illness, hospitalization, and death. Listen, there are 200 hospital workers in San Francisco who’ve gotten sick over the last couple of weeks because of exposure, largely to unvaccinated people who caught Delta who then got the vaccinated sick.

That’s not fair. So, yes, we have to learn to live with this. But today is not the moment where we drop our precautions. When we get all of our kids vaccinated, when we know a little more about the long-term effects of the breakthroughs, then that’s the point at which this becomes yet another virus that is part of our day-to-day life.

BUCK: I just… “We’re never going back to our pre-pandemic reality.” That’s the part that we have to fight against with everything we have. That’s the part we have to summon or vision of what we’re doing to people in Australia and France and Germany, like state-sanctioned psychopaths, Clay. We cannot allow it.

CLAY: Well, and we’re to the point now where covid is the eighth or ninth leading cause of death in the United States, if it’s even that high right now. And I’ve been arguing this for over a year now. But at some point, the obsession with covid because it’s new… If we’re going to be obsessed with health, instead of mandating masks and lockdowns, we should have mandated diets and exercise.

Because the number one way that you could help to protect yourself from covid for much of the last 18 months was by being as healthy as you possibly could, because you can’t control your age, but obesity was one of the massive causes of death associated with covid. If you were obese and you were elderly, covid struck you at a high rate and crippled and killed many people with both of those aspects.

It’s if you were overweight and you were elderly. But we didn’t say anything about, “Hey, exercise more, diet, get your weight under control.” Instead, we said, “Mask and go into your house and never leave. Eat Cheetos and watch Netflix.” We overall increased the average amount of weight that people in America weigh and we were already a fat country.

BUCK: Are you trying to offend our Cheetos-eating listeners? Some people like Cheetos, Clay.

CLAY: I am fat shaming. You can’t fat shame. I know.

BUCK: Don’t be throwing shade at Cheetos.

CLAY: I eat very unhealthy compared to my wife who is gonna live to be 115 years old. But to what extent are we only going to single out covid as if no other illness exists, as if no other way of death exists — as if, frankly, we are ignoring many deaths that are occurring because of our response to covid. Again, if you look at… I’m big on looking at years of life lost, because people to want look at life loss.

Well, we’re all… Spoiler alert. On a Monday in the summer, I’m sorry, as we roll into August. All of us are gonna die, right? Spoiler alert. I hate to hit you with it. What we try to do is make sure that as many people as possible can live long and healthy lives. And what we’re seeing is, the lockdowns are taking many more years right now — I really believe this — off of people’s lives.

Thirty thousand more people died of drug overdoses than have ever died before; the average age of those people are in their thirties and their forties. Well, they lost 40 years of life and think about the math on this. If you look at the average age of death, if somebody’s 40 years old dies, they lose around 40 years of life. Buck, if somebody who’s 80 dies, they may lose a year or six months of life. Years lost is a big deal when it comes to quality of life and life loss.

BUCK: We can’t even agree that it’s not a… Yes, everything you said there is true and worthy. But, Clay, it’s like we can’t actually even get people to all agree right now that instituting a mask mandate in Washington, D.C., when you’ve had two people die in two weeks… You don’t even have a person a day in a city of three-quarters of a million with very dense population in a lot of the city.

We’re treating this as though numbers no longer matter. There’s an obvious effort among some of the Democrat-aligned media to downplay the fact that deaths are very low from covid right now even with how many weeks has the Delta variant been spreading? Los Angeles County the last 14 days, I think it was either six or seven on average a day. Los Angeles County has millions of people! New York City has eight million people!

You’re losing a person or two a day in New York City, and we’re still having this conversation? I got told… Clay you’re gonna be here tomorrow. Don’t worry. I speak lib and I will protect you from the crazy libs here. I just… I know how to distract them. I’ll start talking about intersectionality, because when someone from Nashville who loves freedom shows up, they get very anxious.

But you’re gonna see. There will be stores you go into, restaurants, who all of a sudden are saying, “We gotta go back! We’re in so much danger.” We’re not in so much danger all of a sudden. This is the foundational lie of the panic right now. We’re going to be okay. We are managing this. Everyone needs to calm down, and we need to go to a fully pre-pandemic reality in our day-to-day lives. That’s the point they won’t concede.

CLAY: Amen, and we have the data to reflect this is what is going to happen with the Delta variant because you can look at what happened in India and you can look at what happened in England, and both of those countries got the Delta variant before we did. We’re going to see a spike in overall number of cases. Although hopefully, we’re not going to see that much of a spike in deaths or hospitalizations relative to what we’ve seen before.

And then those numbers are gonna recede. And here’s the deal, Buck. The reason why they need to institute all these new changes is because if they do nothing and we see a little curve and then it comes back down, you’re going to have even more evidence of the truth, which is almost everything we’ve done is cosmetic theater that has had virtually no impact on the spread of the virus.

BUCK: And for anyone who might wonder for a second — any reasonable person who might say, “Hold on, what Clay just said is true. But who could be so diabolical that they wouldn’t want to know the truth about what works against covid and what doesn’t when it comes to mitigating the spread?” Let’s be very clear: As Clay and I said many times, vaccines are effective in bringing down deaths and hospitalizations.

That’s been proven true in the data all this other stuff we’re talking about, the lockdown theater, the people who don’t want us to get to the truth are the people who are held accountable — not just Fauci but the whole health apparatus, all the blue check MDs out there who have been making jackasses of themselves for over a year now on TV demanding these things, demanding you mask up your children —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — and ultimately at the top of all this, too? The Democrat Party’s power apparatus. What happens to the Democrats in the midterms if we all figure out that, one, they basically lied about how Trump was so awful with the virus to beat him. And two, they’re a bunch of clowns who actually ignored the data while they were screaming #science all the time I think that plays badly for them, Clay, among independents and persuadables.

CLAY: I think this is playing awful for them already, Buck.